Word: bonatti
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...Italy's Walter Bonatti, 34: the first successful direttissima-straight up-ascent of the 14,701-ft. Matterhorn's north wall; in Switzerland. Two days after 60 m.p.h. winds forced Bonatti and two friends to abandon a similar assault, he was back on the mountain, alone, inching up the ice-covered rock that leans slightly from the perpendicular (TIME, Feb. 26). It was four days before he finally staggered onto the summit, briefly embraced a wrought-iron cross, then started the descent to Zermatt and a hero's welcome...
...Drop of Water. For Bonatti, the trick now is to find new ways to climb the familiar old hills. And he had a really novel idea for the Matterhorn: a "direttissima" assault, straight up the mountain's ice-coated, practically vertical north wall, a climb that had been tried (without success) only once before-in the summer. It was, shuddered a Swiss guide, "the route that a drop of water would follow...
With two friends, Gigi Panel, 50, and Alberto Tassotti, 47, Bonatti took two days to reach the shelter at Hornli Ridge, 10,500 ft. up, paused briefly to rest, and began to attack the 3,550-ft. cliff of the north wall. Going up hand over hand on nylon ropes, they climbed only 420 ft. on the first day. The next day was almost as tough: 550 ft. Both nights they slept suspended in midair on ropes anchored to pitons, with sleeping bags pulled up to their shoulders and nylon tents over their heads to protect them from the bitter...
...tiny human spiders, inching their way up the mountain. As soon as the plane banked away, clouds swept in. At 3 a.m. it began snowing, and 60-m.p.h. gusts lashed at the climbers, clinging like cocoons to the cliff in their sleeping bags. One gust ripped the tent off Bonatti's head, and tiny slivers of ice, sharp as thumbtacks, dug at his eyes. "I found myself at 13,000 feet in a terrible position," Bonatti said later. His face was rimmed with ice, and he was in excruciating pain. "But we all three had to remain absolutely immobile...
...Bonatti decided to abandon the ascent. At 10:30 a.m., the three men started down-their task made all the trickier because the surface of the rock was covered with fresh ice. Finally, at 6 p.m. they reached the base of the vertical wall and collapsed, exhausted, on a narrow ledge-the first horizontal surface they had seen in five days. They had not eaten or drunk in 72 hours, and when they staggered back into Zermatt after seven days on the Matterhorn, they discovered that newspapers had already given them up for dead. Dead? Next day Bonatti went skiing...